Tag Archives: ethics

Independence Day

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I posted this last year; it bears repeating.

On this day 236 years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years— any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 236 years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Progressives and Democracy

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The Texas legislature, Monday morning, moved forward a bill to ban abortions after the 20th week.  The Progressives’Democrats’ behavior during the debate was—and will be, apparently—illuminating.

Democrats used parliamentary tactics to draw out the debate for 15 hours, pointing out technical mistakes in the process or trying to tack on amendments to fundamentally change the bill.

And

Congresswoman Jessica Farrar (D) gave a personal privilege speech decrying how the Republicans were manipulating the parliamentary process to rush it to a vote.

Never minding that the voting deadline was just hours off, while she and her colleagues were doing everything they could to prevent the vote being taken.

“Everything about the process related to these abortion regulation bills has smelled like partisan politics,” Farrar said.

And

Democrats in the Senate said they would try to filibuster the bill if it came to them on Tuesday, which now appears assured.

Whose partisan politics, really?  Leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of banning late-term abortions, why are these Texas Progressives so afraid of the democratic process that they’ll use whatever partisan tactics they can dream up to block the democratic process, to block an up or down vote?

I can hear the objections now: the Republicans do the same thing when they’re in the minority.  That’s certainly true—the Federal Senate’s filibuster is intended explicitly to protect the minority from mere tyranny.  But that filibuster can be ended by a vote of the body.  Aside from which, if Democrats don’t like it when Republicans do it, how is it all right for Democrats to do it?  Is Democrat morality purely situational?

In the end, of what are these Progressives so afraid that they work so hard to block a vote at all?  That if the democratic process runs its course, they won’t get their way?  Is it, then, that no one can have democracy if Progressives can’t have their way?

Update: In the event, the bill failed.  The Senate’s vote began a few minutes too late, due mostly to a successful Democrat fillibuster and a lack of coherent Republican response to the fillibuster.

A Little Bit of Cynicism

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The Supreme Court has agreed to take up, in its next term, the question of recess appointments and of what is a “recess.”  The DC Circuit had ruled, in the case being appealed, that certain NLRB appointments were unconstitutional and so invalid because they had occurred while the Senate was in session and not in recess.  That court also held both that an actual recess could only occur between the year-long sessions of a Congress and that a recess appointment could be made only for a vacancy that originated during that recess.

President Barack Obama’s Solicitor General, Donald Verilli, in his filing before the Supremes argued with a straight face that were the Court to uphold the DC ruling, it would restrict the president’s power.

To which I ask, “Yeah, and…?”

Verilli also argued with similar seriousness that upholding the DC ruling

…would deem invalid hundreds of recess appointments made by presidents since early in the nation’s history[.]

Umm, no.  It would deem invalid the appointments on appeal and possibly the appointments made under similar circumstances since the NLRB appoints at the start of 2012.  Verilli knows better.

Continued Government Interference in our Markets

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…most recently in our financial markets.  Now the Feds are expanding their hectoring of our financial institutions over their fees.  The Federal government already has chosen to prevent them from making money the old fashion way—through lending—with its artificially suppressed interest rates.  It’s already inveighed against them over one set of fees which they charge as a means of earning a profit for their owners—our fellow Americans.

Now the government is going after another set of fees, with their objection centered on the fact that these Know Betters just don’t like the fees.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creature of Dodd-Frank that is responsible and responsive to no one, has begun the process of obstructing the collection of overdraft fees—the fees charged when folks write checks with insufficient funds to cover them, so the bank covers the bad checks or transfers funds from the check-writers’ savings accounts (with the check writers’ prior permission) to cover the bad checks.

Usually, such bad checks result from a moment of carelessness.  More than occasionally, though, those bad checks are written by serial offenders, who rely on those overdraft processes to make their bad checks good.

Of course, the CFPB has said

it has no immediate plans to issue or recommend new overdraft-fee rules.

This is disingenuous, though: the criticism by a government agency has its own intimidative effect.  For instance,

In 2011, Bank of America Corp, the second-largest US bank by assets, quickly abandoned plans for a monthly debit-card charge of $5 after it was denounced by lawmakers….

Nevertheless, the CFPB is bellyaching that

heavy users of overdraft coverage pay about $900 a year more than consumers who don’t incur overdraft fees.

This is bad how, exactly?  Why should responsible customers have to subsidize the careless ones for their carelessness?  After all, the costs of making good on those bad checks have to be covered somehow—if not through fees paid by the bad check writers, then by spreading those costs across all the bank’s customers, responsible and…careless…alike.

The best way to hold down the annual costs of writing bad checks is for government to stay out of the market place and for the writers to stop writing bad checks.

The Jack Daniel Employees’ Credit Union charges $10 when a customer overdraws on an account.  Pam Case, manager of the Lynchburg, TN, credit union, said keeping the fee low helps lure customers.  “They like that we don’t have a lot of fees,” she said.

Which demonstrates how well the competition of a free market regulates fees.

Progressive Government Run Amok

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In no particular order, we’ve had in just the last few months the following:

1.  The State Department leaving Benghazi consulate personnel to die, with too little security and no effort to help real-time; a President who absented himself from the situation in favor of a political campaign; and subsequent lies and cover-ups by both about events surrounding that.

2.  The Department of Justice targeting our free press and individual members of it in order to suppress reporting of the secret doings of our government.

3.  The Internal Revenue Service targeting American conservatives.  The low-level IRS staffers now are testifying before the House that they weren’t just ordered to target those who disagreed with the present administration, they were given the specific subjects and questions to be used and to forward specific cases to their bosses for further “treatment.”

And there’s this little IRS gem:

On May 23, Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) dropped the bombshell that his subcommittee has been in constant contact with the overseers of the IRS political-targeting scandal since it started, and even discussed the applications of “certain” specific groups.

4.  The secret metadata collection program, consisting of the gathering up of the phone calling records of millions of Americans who use Verizon (and presumably of the other American phone companies, also; we don’t know yet because the whole thing is…secret).

5.  The reading of all of our emails, text messages, video down/uploads, and so on via the Internet through another secret program, this one called PRISM.

6.  The government justifying the spying on Americans by claiming it to be a

critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.

And

The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday.

This in light of the fact that DHS has already labelled (deliberately and overtly, early on) American military veterans and those who oppose the Obama administration as extremists and threats.  Thus, it’s important to note that the information, as broadly swept up as it is, also allows a Progressive government to surveill known or suspected persons who disagree with the government’s policies and to hinder their activities.